Simone Biles doesn’t need much encouragement to either take a selfie in the athletes’ village, or to post it on her social media accounts.
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“There is a lot of satisfaction I have in winning gold on vault”. The scoreboard added an exclamation point.
Phelps has won this event at the last three Olympic Games but expect strong competition from the likes of world record holder Ryan Lochte.
He ends his career with 23 gold medals, more than any Olympic athlete in history.
Biles, 19, would not reveal where she is storing her medals, although she did say she allowed her family members to pose with them around their necks.
Almost 45 minutes after finishing second in the 50-meter freestyle Saturday night in Rio, Simone Manuel was back in the water looking for her fourth medal of the Games. You really won.’ I was like, ‘Oh, I guess I did’.
“I would put Simone now on top”, she added. It wasn’t hard to keep Biles engaged heading into the event which Boorman thought would be Biles’ best when she reached the elite level in 2013. At the past three world championships, she piled up 14 medals, including three all-around crowns. She got way more height than any of her competitors, and her form during the twist was flawless. Her first go on the vault ended with a bit of a hop on her landing, earning her a 15.9. Which she nearly never does and rarely is. The margin between Simone and Maria Paseka, who won the silver, was over 0.70.
“Just because she wins every single competition”, Raisman said.
And she’s carrying something else, as she told USA magazine: a white rosary tucked into her gym bag, a gift from her mother Nellie (the grandparents who adopted her when she was 5 years old). Biles and Raisman started the night with a pair of solid Amanar vaults, putting them in first and second place, but lost ground when they moved to uneven bars. “It’s something that I wanted so badly”, she said. “That’s just her personality”.
Until the point that Mustafina mounted the bars to start her routine, the US were eyeing up a clean sweep of the women’s gymnastics golds, thanks to the irrepressible Biles.
She sat fourth after the vault and the uneven bars Thursday, then finished with almost flawless routines on balance beam and floor exercise. She is the reigning world champion on both events. She tumbled and flipped and twisted with precision and confidence, moving more easily than us mere mortals do on flat ground.
Never mind the judges thought highly enough of it to give her a 15.9.
A second gold and more to come?
She spoke of the difficulty in being a rare black swimmer on the American team, how it has attracted positive attention but at the same time brought a burden. She stepped out to the middle of the arena, waved at the audience and made heart with her hands. Biles’ Friday selfie was short on words, but said everything it needed to. Douglas finished seventh, the second time she failed to medal in the uneven bars final at the Olympics.
Sure, she’d won her third consecutive all-around title, a first for a female gymnast.
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“It’s such an honor to be under that name, I don’t know what to think”, Biles said.
